Overview

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This course equips women leaders who oversee teams with the tools to negotiate and advocate more strategically for themselves, their teams, and their organizations. You will learn to map key negotiation and advocacy opportunities in your current role by analyzing interests, Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (BATNAs), sources of power, and potential barriers shaped by gendered expectations and organizational politics. You will diagnose common forms of gender bias, stereotype threat, and backlash risk that emerge in negotiation and advocacy settings, and choose concrete strategies to mitigate their impact while preserving your authority and psychological safety. Building on this foundation, you will apply structured negotiation frameworks to real workplace challenges such as roles, resources, visibility, and organizational initiatives. You will learn to adapt advocacy strategies to different stakeholders and power dynamics, tailoring your messaging, framing, and influence tactics across levels, functions, and cultures. Through practice with scripts and tools, you will conduct difficult conversations about compensation, role scope, and support using assertive, data-backed, and values-aligned communication that both protects relationships and advances your interests. You will also learn to leverage networks, champions, and allies to amplify your advocacy and institutionalize agreed changes, and to evaluate your negotiation efforts for continuous improvement. By the end of the course, you will be able to design clear negotiation and advocacy plans that set goals, define walk-away conditions, and sequence asks to create mutual value for you and your organization. You will use influence and framing techniques to position your proposals as advancing shared organizational priorities such as performance, equity, and innovation, increasing senior stakeholders’ willingness to support your initiatives. Finally, you will create a personal leadership and advocacy roadmap that integrates your values, long-term career vision, and leadership identity as a woman, translating the course insights into concrete commitments you will implement with your team and across your organization.

Syllabus

Spot Negotiation Opportunities and Power Dynamics
- This opening module expands the idea of negotiation beyond salary to include role scope, resources, visibility, decision rights, and organizational change. Learners will examine interests, BATNAs, stakeholder maps, and sources of power to identify where influence is possible in their current leadership context. The module also introduces how organizational politics and gendered expectations can shape what seems negotiable and who gets heard.
Plan Value-Creating Asks and Proposals
- In this module, learners translate insight into a clear negotiation plan using practical frameworks such as interest-based negotiation, issue prioritization, walk-away conditions, and value creation across issues. The focus is on building proposals that are both ambitious and realistic, especially in workplace negotiations that mix distributive and integrative elements. Learners will also practice framing asks in ways that connect personal goals to team and business outcomes.
Lead Difficult Conversations with Authority
- This module focuses on execution: what to say, how to say it, and how to stay grounded when conversations become tense. Learners will practice assertive communication, relational accounts, and authority-preserving responses to objections, interruptions, questioned expertise, and other microaggressions. The goal is to help leaders advocate effectively while protecting both relationships and psychological safety.
Build Sponsorship and Sustain Advocacy Growth
- The final module helps learners move from single negotiations to a longer-term advocacy practice. Learners will identify allies, sponsors, and cross-functional partners who can strengthen influence before and after high-stakes asks, then review negotiation outcomes to improve future performance. The course closes with a personal roadmap for using negotiation and organizational advocacy as an ongoing leadership capability.